A Saturday

This is just to record what a Saturday during what we hope are the late stages of the pandemic looks like here.

Slept well but had complicated dreams; the only part I remember is that I ran into Mike Sonnenschein in Pittsburgh while eating a gigantic meatball I’d bought at a hipster bookstore, and he invited me over, but when I got there, it wasn’t Mike’s house anymore, it was Craig Westerland’s. Akshay Venkatesh was there too. We were going to work on something but nobody really knew how to start and Craig and Akshay were absently flipping through their phones. The thing was, Craig had a tiger for a pet and the tiger got out of its cage and seemed really threatening. It was a bad scene.

A cold wave from the arctic settled in here overnight and it was 7 Fahrenheit this morning. AB and I made French toast with the challah that was left over from last night and watched Kids Baking Challenge on Netflix. Then I had to go out into it and scrape the car, remembering, as I do every time I scrape the car, that I broke the head off the scraper so I have to use the jagged plastic edge of what used to be the head, which works well at breaking up the big chunks of ice but is pretty bad at getting the window fully clean. I’ve lived here long enough to not find 7 Fahrenheit that bad, for the fifteen minutes it takes to scrape off the car. I wore the voluminous sweater that’s so ugly I wear it only on the coldest days. I’m not even sure it’s that warm, but psychologically the body feels it wouldn’t be clad in such an ugly sweater unless the sweater was warm, and that creates the right sensation.

Quiet afternoon. CJ had a mock trial competition against teams from Oregon and Brookfield. AB and I worked on some fractions homework. I posted an early-term course questionnaire for the real analysis course I’m teaching for the first time in my life, and I went through another 50 pages of page proofs of Shape. How there can still be so many typos and small verbal infelicities, after I and others have gone over it so many times, I don’t really know. And there will still be some I miss, and which will appear on paper in thousands of printed books. I wrote a math email to Aaron Landesman, about something related to my work with Westerland and Venkatesh (no tigers.) In honor of Dr. Mrs. Q’s half-birthday we got takeout from Graze for dinner. They had the patty melt special, which I’ve only seen there once before, and which is superb, certainly the best patty melt in the city. I got it with Impossible since we don’t eat milk and meat together in the house.

After dinner, we did what we’ve been doing a lot of weekends, play online games at Jackbox with my sister’s family and my parents. Then we all retreated into our zones. AB is doing some homework. CJ is talking to friends on the phone. I washed dishes while I watched a movie, Fort Tilden, about people being out in the city, in the summer, coming in and out of contact with other people. It was funny.

I’m going to put AB to bed and then think, just a little bit, about a cohomology group whose contribution I don’t understand.

Dream (boxes)

I’m at my friend Debbie Wassertzug’s house; for some reason there’s a lot of old stuff of mine in her house, boxes and books and papers and miscellany, stuff I haven’t had access to for years. I have my car with me and I’ve come by to pick it up, but unfortunately, she and her family are going to Miami — they’re leaving for the airport in five minutes — that’s how much time I have to figure out which of my things to pack and which to leave at her house, possibly for good. And I can’t decide. I’m stuck. Some of my stuff is out on shelves. An old boombox, a bunch of books. And when I look at each of those things, I think, can I live without having this? I’ve been getting along without it so far. I should take one of the sealed boxes instead, there might be something in there I really want to have again. But what if what’s in the sealed boxes is worthless to me? I’m paralyzed and very aware of Debbie and her family packing up as they get ready to leave. I feel like I could make a good decision if I only had a second to really think about it. I wake up without deciding anything.

Pandemic blog 41: dream

I’m in New York City. An app on my phone shows me when anyone in my contact list comes nearby, and I see that my friend Mark Poirier is just a block away — I haven’t seen him in years, what a treat! So I go meet up with him. We’re hungry so we go to an underground food court to get doner kebab. But suddenly I realize, I’m not wearing a mask, nobody‘s wearing a mask, what am I doing inside in a crowded place unmasked? Fortunately I have one with me, so I put it on; but a woman in a block-print T-shirt first glares at me, then gets into it with me, insisting that I shouldn’t wear one. I don’t know how to respond; I feel chastened, even though I know I’m in the right.

Dream

I’m at Disney World with CJ, on a Pirates of the Caribbean-style ride, a car careening through a tunnel.  On the wall of the tunnel there are math posters, the kind you’d see in a high school classroom, about Pascal’s triangle, conic sections, etc.  And I feel sort of annoyed and depressed, because I know that Disney is going to make a big deal about how educational this ride is, but actually, nobody except me is looking at the posters, nobody who didn’t already know the math could get anything out of the posters, the way the car speeds down the track.

Please interpret and derive relevant policy prescriptions for math pedagogy in comments.

Jordan and the Dream of Rogen

The other night I dreamed I was going into a coffeeshop and Seth Rogen was sitting at an outside table eating a salad.  He was wearing a jeans jacket and his skin was sort of bad.  I have always admired Rogen’s work so I screwed up my courage, went up to his table and said

“Are you…”

And he said, “Yes, I am… having the chef’s salad.  You should try it, it’s great.”

And I sort of stood there and goggled and then he was like, “Yeah, no, yes, I’m Seth Rogen.”

I feel proud of my unconscious mind for producing what I actually consider a reasonably Seth Rogen-style gag!

GET YOUR FINGER OFF OF ME!

As you know, I love ’80s videos and I love the Orioles, so obviously I have no choice but to post this fantastic shot-from-the-stands video of Earl Weaver coming out to argue a call, getting ejected, and then sticking around to cuss out the ump for three full minutes.

Thanks to the miracle of Google News Archive (searching for ‘”Earl Weaver” ejected’ in the early 1980s, then scanning for Tigers games) and baseball-reference.com (which will show you the O’s entire 1980 schedule, making it easy to see when they faced the Tigers at home with Mike Flanagan on the mound) I can tell you that this is September 17, 1980, top of the first inning, and that Weaver is arguing with first base umpire Bill Haller about a balk call on Flanagan that moved Alan Trammell to second base. The Orioles end up winning 9-3.

I dreamed about the Orioles the other night. I was taking CJ to his first game. We were playing the Yankees. We had very cheap seats in a sparsely populated part of the upper deck on the first-base side; when a foul ball came our way I was the only one scrambling for it, and I brought it back for CJ.

Pretty mundane dream, right? But I should also add that the pitcher for the Yankees was an overweight man in a dress. And in the middle of an at-bat the other Yankee players rushed in, hoisted him up on their shoulders, and carried him off the field; this was ruled a balk and the runner on third scored. Later the pitcher appeared in our row of the stands. At this close distance, I could see that his makeup needed serious work.

Anyway, here’s Earl. If you’re at work, you might want to turn the sound down first.